shader 1 stuff is really useful for mask blending different brush effects, masking allows you to easily blens different terrain types in the same brush with unique UV's and little effort for the artist if they had something like pipelines blitz material editor.
if you can mask this way you can do nice things like simple corroded or worn pipes, where you have a rust texture, a shared bump and specular and reflection mask, and a cubic environment map, and make nice work industrial stuff that looks cool, and on a Geforce 3 or higher will look really nice and takes a lot of the hassle out of producing the work for the artists and coders involved.
For me to do that easily in blitz now I need to have double geometry and brushes and risk a lot of sorting issues. Either that or rely on the coder to code each multipass rendered surface. I see shaders as a nice way to give the developers freedom, without long convoluted workarounds using regular techniques that are very time consuming and inpractical to implement.
easy layered masking may not sound cool to a coder, but for an artist its a feature that enables them to produce AAA quality visuals without a lot of effort. It may still require 2 or even 3 passes in hardware and in effect double the actual rendered geometry, but its a damn sight easier to have that done automatically than have to do it all in code, or model duplicate geometry, and pray that every poly is in the exact same work space to avoid sorting.
I'm sure a lot of people will never use the most fancy shaders done in PS2, it's overkill and the work required to implement them will be seen by a minority, when you shoudl be trying to support the best features the majority of people can enjoy.
Anyway, your engine ovbiously does shader 1.1 so its not a problem, but most people using 2.0 will probably be the usual tech demo creators, not those trying to make commercial quality games for a broad demographic.
Hopefully if Vivid does well, there will be some 3rd party exporters created with it, that allow non coders and non blitz owners developing blitz games to make good use of it.
anyway, look forward to seeing some good graphics demo's for your product. I'm hoping pudding supports Bmax as well as he has Blitz3D, in which case I'll stick to the bmax rendering engine, as the way pipeline works allows a max user like me to throw together animated, 3D, or 2D in 3D UI's in a couple of hours and experiment with most of what blitz has to offer and get the look I want eithout any coding whatsoever. I also don't have to rely on the coder to understand the look I'm trying to get in my artwork. Which can sometimes be a real pain if your relying one someone to code a lot of effects for you, and leaving you powerless to tweak them and experiment.
Kind of like the glows and blooms in FMC.
I shoudl probably read my post but I have to take off, if it sounds overly critical, it wasn't meant to sorry. Really hope it is a big success :)
if you can mask this way you can do nice things like simple corroded or worn pipes, where you have a rust texture, a shared bump and specular and reflection mask, and a cubic environment map, and make nice work industrial stuff that looks cool, and on a Geforce 3 or higher will look really nice and takes a lot of the hassle out of producing the work for the artists and coders involved.
For me to do that easily in blitz now I need to have double geometry and brushes and risk a lot of sorting issues. Either that or rely on the coder to code each multipass rendered surface. I see shaders as a nice way to give the developers freedom, without long convoluted workarounds using regular techniques that are very time consuming and inpractical to implement.
easy layered masking may not sound cool to a coder, but for an artist its a feature that enables them to produce AAA quality visuals without a lot of effort. It may still require 2 or even 3 passes in hardware and in effect double the actual rendered geometry, but its a damn sight easier to have that done automatically than have to do it all in code, or model duplicate geometry, and pray that every poly is in the exact same work space to avoid sorting.
I'm sure a lot of people will never use the most fancy shaders done in PS2, it's overkill and the work required to implement them will be seen by a minority, when you shoudl be trying to support the best features the majority of people can enjoy.
Anyway, your engine ovbiously does shader 1.1 so its not a problem, but most people using 2.0 will probably be the usual tech demo creators, not those trying to make commercial quality games for a broad demographic.
Hopefully if Vivid does well, there will be some 3rd party exporters created with it, that allow non coders and non blitz owners developing blitz games to make good use of it.
anyway, look forward to seeing some good graphics demo's for your product. I'm hoping pudding supports Bmax as well as he has Blitz3D, in which case I'll stick to the bmax rendering engine, as the way pipeline works allows a max user like me to throw together animated, 3D, or 2D in 3D UI's in a couple of hours and experiment with most of what blitz has to offer and get the look I want eithout any coding whatsoever. I also don't have to rely on the coder to understand the look I'm trying to get in my artwork. Which can sometimes be a real pain if your relying one someone to code a lot of effects for you, and leaving you powerless to tweak them and experiment.
Kind of like the glows and blooms in FMC.
I shoudl probably read my post but I have to take off, if it sounds overly critical, it wasn't meant to sorry. Really hope it is a big success :)